New Act Pushes Medicare to Pilot Home Safety Modifications for 20,000 Seniors to Prevent Falls

The newly proposed Stand Strong Falls Prevention Act is a straightforward public health push aimed at tackling one of the most common and costly injuries among older adults: falls. The bill’s main move is establishing an Advisory Committee on Falls Prevention under the Administration on Aging to coordinate the nation’s strategy and make concrete policy recommendations.

The Committee That Reads the Fine Print

This isn't just another committee; it’s a group designed to act as the federal government’s collective brain on senior safety. It will be composed of heavy hitters from across the federal landscape—think representatives from the CDC, Medicare (CMS), the VA, and the NIH—alongside 12 non-federal experts, including doctors, caregivers, and consumer advocates. Their job is to look at every federally funded falls prevention program out there, evaluate what actually works, and then recommend which programs should be expanded, cut, or combined. This structure, detailed in Section 2, aims to stop throwing money at programs that don’t deliver and focus resources on evidence-based solutions.

The Real-World Game Changer: Home Modifications

The most significant element for everyday people is the committee’s mandate to recommend piloting Medicare coverage for basic home modifications. Specifically, the committee must recommend developing pilot programs under Medicare (Title XVIII of the Social Security Act) to cover simple fixes, like grab bars or better lighting, that reduce falls for at least 20,000 beneficiaries. If you have an aging parent or grandparent, you know that a simple throw rug or a slippery bathroom floor can lead to a hospital trip costing thousands. This provision acknowledges that preventing a fall at home is far cheaper and better for everyone than treating a broken hip. It aims to shift Medicare from only paying for injury treatment to paying for injury prevention.

Cutting Through the Jargon: The STEADI Tool

Beyond the home fix pilots, the committee is also tasked with recommending ways to get healthcare providers to use the CDC’s STEADI tool. STEADI stands for Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries. It’s an evidence-based approach for screening, assessing, and intervening with patients who are at risk of falling. For the average person, this means that your primary care doctor would be prompted to actively check your risk factors—like medication interactions or balance issues—during regular appointments, rather than waiting until an accident happens. This moves falls prevention from a niche concern to a standard part of geriatric care.

What Happens Next?

The committee is set to exist for 10 years, and within one year of being fully appointed, they must deliver their initial report to Congress and the Assistant Secretary. Following that, the Assistant Secretary must report to Congress every four years on the nation’s progress and, crucially, evaluate any Medicare pilot programs that were launched. The goal is clear: find the successful prevention programs and recommend expanding them nationwide by the year 2030. This bill is essentially setting up a decade-long, data-driven effort to make sure our aging population can stay on their feet, which is good news for their health and our healthcare costs.